The Development of Qualitative Health

The purpose of this article, which was a keynote presentation at the Qualitative Health Research Conference (QHR 2000) in Banff, Canada, is to provide a historical perspective of qualitative research in nursing over the past 20 years. Van Gennep’s model of rites of passage is used as a heuristic. A discussion of the stages of stopping, waiting, transition, and entry is followed by speculation about the key characteristics necessary for qualitative research to be valued and valuable in the future. In this article, I offer a glance at the evolution of qualitative health research anda projection for the future, at least from the perspective of a nurse who has engaged in it for the past quarter of a century. First, I will provide a historical per-spective, which may serve to evoke some collective memories and experiences and to illuminate how the past and present shape the future. I have adopted the anthropologist Van Gennep’s (1909/1960) model of rites of passage as a way of examining the evolution of qualitative research in health. Van Gennep viewed rites of passage as a series of transitional experiences, marked by ritual events, that includes stages of stopping, waiting, transition, and entry. Although the stages appear sequential, they are not lock step. There are no clear demarcations; rather, there are “cycles and phases, ” “breaks and ruptures ” (Lincoln & Denzin, 1994, p. 575), slipping and sliding in various areas. Van Gennep provided a heu-ristic for thinking about what has happened over time in qualitative health research in general and nursing in particular. After I discuss these stages, I will end with some futuristic speculation about where qualitative research might be in the new millennium